Girls Who Play Dead

by Joelle Wellington

Genres: YA Social Themes; YA Mysteries & Thrillers; YA Romance

Synopsis

Two siblings investigate the murder of a friend only to unearth even more deadly mysteries in their small town in this page-turning young adult thriller from the acclaimed author of Their Vicious Games.

When Mikky Graves left his small, stifling hometown of Prophets Lake to live with his estranged mother, he thought nothing could ever make him return for good.

Until his sister Kyla’s best friend, Erin, is murdered.

Mikky never worried about leaving Kyla behind at their family-owned funeral home so long as she had Erin. But when Mikky heads home, determined to help Kyla grieve, the sister he encounters barely resembles the one he remembers. Mikky decides, then and there, to do the one thing that seems even more impossible than returning: stay.

As Kyla spirals further into her rage and secrets, Mikky realizes the only thing that can help his sister is finding the truth about who killed Erin. But the more he investigates, the further he’s pulled into other ugly mysteries of Prophets Lake and the beauty brand that is its lifeblood. The town’s rot runs deep, and everyone has something to hide. Perhaps no one more than Kyla herself.

Release date: November 4, 2025

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 336

Sample

Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE
It’s a cruel thing, what the Vaughns are asking, but Kyla’s father told her that they were allowed a little bit of cruelty, after what someone took from them.

“We don’t trust anyone else. We barely trusted the coroner,” Mrs. Vaughn said when they came into the funeral home, her voice steadier than her hands. Kyla had watched as the woman fiddled with her ring, loose on her slim finger. “They kept her body for two extra days than they said they would. Two. And they wouldn’t tell us why. No one would tell us why.”

“We want to have the funeral a few days before school starts, so that… that Jason can have a chance to mourn. Tell us you can do it by then?” Mr. Vaughn asked gruffly. He kept his eyes trained on the ceiling, in a way that Kyla had seen only twice before. He was trying not to cry.

Kyla wanted to say that was impossible. That they needed more time to put together a half-decent ceremony, let alone the kind of proceedings that someone like Erin deserved.

But this was the Vaughns, so it would be done.

Now Kyla stands above her best friend’s body. Erin’s nails are still chipped from when she and Kyla tried yet another new tumbling pass last Tuesday, but her delicate hands have turned blue. She looks nothing like herself. She looks everything like herself. And Kyla can’t believe the Vaughns could bring her here. Could be so, so cruel.

“They’re going through something,” Dad says.

I’ve been going through something, Kyla thinks. For six days, three hours, fifty-one minutes.

She bends closer, close enough that she can see her reflection in Erin’s empty, glassy eyes. Kyla knows the cause of death. She’s seen the death certificate herself, another rush order made possible by the breadth of the Vaughns’ reach.

Manner of death is listed simply—homicide. Kyla mouths the word, rolling it around on her tongue, but can’t quite manage to force it out. Cause of death seems to have been far more complicated to discern, but the body never tells a lie, especially not dead ones. Blooming bruises across Erin’s back and legs, where she’d collided with the cliff on her way down. Her ankle at a strange angle, like a broken doll. The mark on her head that had ended her pain. The press of ten fingertips forever imprinted on her skin where someone had gripped her tight, shook her, and shoved.

“Do they have any idea of who might’ve—” Kyla starts then stops, struck by the thin line of purple along Erin’s temple that disappears into her hair. Kyla used to rap her fingers against Erin’s head, a childhood taunt about Erin being a little mindless. Now Erin’s had a knock on the head hard enough to make her truly mindless. Voiceless. Lifeless.

She lies on the embalming table, so very still, and it’s wrong. This is a girl who has always been in motion. Kyla is the still one.

That’s no longer true.

Kyla and her father breathe heavily, not sure where to start. Exactly sure where to start.

“Kyla, honey, you don’t have to be here,” Dad says.

Kyla blinks slowly. Yes, she does. She knows Erin best. She has to be the one to put her back together.

“I’ll get my gear.” She goes to the locker and pulls her scrubs over her loungewear, already overheating, her oversized T-shirt clinging to slick skin. She doesn’t have a wig on, but her hair is braided down, so it’s easy to pull the scrub cap over her head.

Her father snaps the respirator around the back of her head and Kyla feels like an alien. Good. An alien belongs to space, to the infinite nothing. An alien does not know Erin Vaughn. An alien does not need to mourn Erin Vaughn.

So it’s an alien that helps her father through the process of making Erin Vaughn forever sixteen. An alien that freezes Erin’s face into a gentle expression, softening her edges into something so different from her usual ferociousness. It’s an alien that brushes Erin’s hair back from her face, an alien that doesn’t flinch when her father makes the small incisions with loving care and pumps the blood from Erin’s body, replacing it with formaldehyde.

Kyla Graves peeks through her alien skin and wishes she could steal away Erin’s heart and bury it in the wet ground, at the base of their heart tree in the back. But then her father tucks Erin’s heart (Kyla’s heart) away again where she can’t touch it, can’t see it, and Kyla is the alien again. This is something that Kyla knows how to do even if she’s not quite old enough yet that she should. It shouldn’t make a difference that it’s Erin, she tells herself.

Then Kyla loses time.

She’s been doing that a lot in the past six days.

When she comes back, her father is talking and Kyla nods her way through a conversation while she waits for the formaldehyde to fight back rigor mortis.

They must have washed Erin again for the chemical stains. The places that the morgue missed. Because the purple stain at her hairline is gone now and she looks at peace. Alien Kyla can tell herself that Erin is asleep, even though the real Kyla knows Erin always slept wild, twitching and restless. Maybe it’s just a really good sleep, the deep kind after a night out, or a hard dance practice.

There is one thing left to do and she knows exactly how.

“Let me do her makeup,” Kyla says.

“Yeah?” Dad asks quietly.

“Yes. She should look like herself,” Kyla decides.

The day they were finally allowed to wear makeup every day came not long after they’d turned thirteen. Mrs. Vaughn promised them she’d take them to work with her to get the basics. It had been a big to-do, Kyla’s dad nervous about letting her take off school for something as frivolous as makeup. Mrs. Vaughn had taken his hand and assuredly said, “There is nothing more important than a girl’s first foundation,” and with no other mother to dispute this, Dad had taken her at her word.

Entering Cook Cosmetics, Kyla and Erin had been dressed in their best outfits, ones that they’d painstakingly chosen over the course of a week. Both of them were called “so sophisticated” by the receptionist in the whitewashed lobby, accented by Cook’s sea green, and that’s how they’d known they were correct in their selections.

When finally lunchtime came around, Mrs. Vaughn had ferried them with smug delight through long hallways lined with large, framed Cook advertisements, each painted and marked with a placard stating the year. They passed years of Cook history, years of one woman climbing to the top, then pulling the women and girls of Prophets Lake along with her, until finally, they came to an unassuming door.

“What is this?” Erin said, voice dripping with disdain. She was already tired, just a few hours in, bored with the monotony of her mother’s day-to-day, in sharp contrast to what she’d been expecting—shopping and brand planning. Kyla had been fascinated, even by the number of emails Mrs. Vaughn had been greeted with from the very first moment that she’d opened her swollen inbox. Mrs. Vaughn was a big deal.

“Beauty,” Mrs. Vaughn said as she shoved the door open, revealing the most magical place in the entire world—the Cook Cosmetics’ product closet.

Each shelf was lined with sea-green matte foundation bottles, slim eye-shadow palettes, pans of bronzer and highlight, tubes of lipstick, and fluffy brushes. Kyla’s stomach dropped between her legs, her want so strong, but she shoved her hands behind her back, even as Erin lunged forward, hungry.

“Only three things, girls,” Mrs. Vaughn said, nodding at the intern in all black, tucked into the corner. The intern dutifully went to assist Erin.

Kyla had to be brought forward by Mrs. Vaughn.

“You won’t ever have to look far for your shade with Cook, Kyla,” Mrs. Vaughn reassured her, handing her the soft matte bottle, the sea-green bulb at the top waiting to be twisted open to reveal the thick formula that would melt perfectly into Kyla’s skin.

That day, Kyla came away with a lip gloss, a foundation, and a mascara. Mrs. Vaughn spent the evening teaching them how to apply it perfectly.

Not two days later, Kyla returned, eager for another lesson, but instead she watched as Mrs. Vaughn discovered Erin’s gluttony, the horde of product that she’d shoved into her pockets and her bag, some of the eye-shadow palettes now crushed to fine powder at the bottom. It was a shouting match, not unusual. “Why can’t you ever listen, Erin? Kyla listens! You never understand the consequences of your actions,” Mrs. Vaughn shouted. The intern that assisted Erin had been dismissed for crimes she hadn’t committed.

Kyla doesn’t know if Mrs. Vaughn ever told anyone what had really happened, if that intern was ever exonerated.

It doesn’t matter now, anyway. Erin’s finally faced the consequences of her own actions. She’s paid a much higher price.

The thought forces her back to the present. Kyla reaches for Erin’s curated assortment of Cook Cosmetics products, delivered by the Vaughns and stained around the edges from use. She is careful as she paints Erin almost back to life. A flawless base with a satiny finish. Feathery eyebrows, no shadow underneath. Erin had no patience for that. Not for precision, either. She liked her liner messy. Mrs. Vaughn would prefer something neater, but Kyla smears kohl around Erin’s eyes anyway. Clumps on the mascara, too. She looks like she’s going to a party. She looks like Eleanor Rigby.

She looks like the night she died.

“Is that right?” Dad asks, hesitant.

Kyla finishes her off with setting spray. “It’s perfect,” she says lovingly. “She looks like herself.”

“Okay. Good,” Dad says. “Good. Kyla…”

She doesn’t listen. She grips Erin’s hand tight in hers.

Erin doesn’t squeeze back like she always did.

Kyla can squeeze as hard as she wants, squeeze so hard that all Erin’s death-stiffened fingers snap, and the girl wouldn’t make a sound. Erin wouldn’t scream. She wouldn’t laugh. She wouldn’t smile and she wouldn’t rage. There’s nothing but a body that looks like Erin but isn’t. There never will be an Erin Vaughn again.

Kyla cradles Erin’s hand, thumbing lightly over her knuckles as she comes to terms with the idea that she’ll never feel the warmth of Erin’s palm again. She comes to terms with the fact—because the alien needs facts—that it’s all her fault. She commits this thought to her heart.

And then she drops her best friend’s hand.